<p>What a horribly designed form! My son is entering his online and is having trouble with the activities section. Many of his activities are for so many weeks during the year, but the form doesn’t have a way to break out hours per week and weeks per year. How are your kids handling it?</p>
<p>You’re right–parts of the form are a little abtuse. The activities table has a “dates of participation” column and an “hours per week” column, but no “weeks per year” column. For all activities, even seasonal ones, S just put the years for the dates of participation and the hours per week when the activity was in full swing. No place to explain any further on the form.</p>
<p>What is the presidential scholar program? Thanks</p>
<p>Thanks, yayverily. He had been working hard on the essays and assumed the activities would be laid out as they are on the Common App. There is very little space to explain activities!</p>
<p>guitars101, here’s a link with info about the Presidential Scholars program: [Presidential</a> Scholars Program](<a href=“http://www.ed.gov/programs/psp/index.html]Presidential”>U.S. Presidential Scholars Program)
It is not a monetary scholarship, but a recognition program with the winning students receiving a trip to Washington D.C. Some students are nominated for the program based upon artistic ability, and others for academic ability with SAT or ACT scores being the basis for the first cut. There’s an involved application with essays, a school report, etc.</p>
<p>“abtuse” – obtuse, right?</p>
<p>And yes, you’re right. The application is a little obtuse. But remember that this is the same administration that came up with No Child Left Behind.</p>
<p>And after this little diversion, I return to a hearty round of essay-writing.</p>
<p>lobgent, are you handling your activity hours in the same way as yayverily’s son?</p>
<p>I also think the form was horribly designed–especially if you do it online. I don’t want to over-represent son’s activities nor under-represent them! We downloaded the forms and filled in things like “Fall 2005-present”. We ended up trying to cram information into the small spaces, and it was hard to figure out which categories things should go in. As we finally closed up the envelope, I took one look back at the instructions and thought–“He better not be disqualified because we took liberties with the form’s spaces!”</p>
<p>I also wonder about the long essay. If the picture is something significant to you, then how are you supposed to exhibit the depth of your knowledge? Very strange.</p>
<p>OK, lobgent. So I made a typo. At least my grammar is well.</p>
<p>Potato, potatoe…you know what I meant.</p>
<p>Yayverily, my son was a little nervous about the hours idea so called first thing this morning. The person’s response was it was fine to put the hours just as your son did. siusplau, this was my son’s first experience with a government form. Another rite of passage.</p>
<p>As my D put it . . . “the mother of all applications”</p>
<p>Yeah… It’s due TOMORROW at 5pm right??? <em>freaks out have to check the deadline lol</em></p>
<p>The online application doesn’t allow one to write “present” and also requires specific dates of the month…I don’t remember specific dates!</p>
<p>How are you guys handling this?</p>
<p>For some one-time activities my son was able to find the exact dates online. For some school activities he looked at this year’s activity calendar and used those dates to estimate when he started and put down when he expects to end the activity this year.</p>
<p>I put mostly the first days of the month, unless I remembered specific days.</p>
<p>Does anyone else find this application terribly lackluster compared to the Common App? I DO! I plugged my main essay into the textbox and was told I had about 2500 characters left, but when I went to the print preview, a whole paragraph had been hacked off. Grrr…</p>
<p>I usually just guessed the dates. And for present, apparently you weren’t required to fill in an end date - I didn’t for my piano studies.</p>
<p>Wow, really lobgent?? That’s weird!! For me, I copy and pasted my short essays, positive that they went over the character limit, but it worked - and nothing was hacked off on the print preview! Yeah, that application absolutely sucked!</p>
<p>I found that you could circumvent the character limits if you use Firefox. You just paste the whole hunk of text at the same time. It’ll tell you that you’ve maxed out the character count but all the text shows up in the print preview.</p>
<p>Our D downloaded the microsoft word application that can be updated. She just typed in her stuff directly into the document, as did her GC for the second part. Then overnighted the whole package. It still involved headaches. The pagination kept getting messed up. And my D was absolutely in a state over the essays. Just so tired of essays. Oh well. All done now. Sounds like odds are slim to nil for being in the final bunch. Congratulations to all here - parents and students - who were involved in this. The applications was a bear but it was a nice problem to have.</p>
<p>chronicidal: That’s exactly what I did. Go firefox! haha</p>
<p>chronicidal - </p>
<p>I’m not that tech-savvy, but does doing that violate the instructions that say that altering the form in any way will disqualify the application. A friend of mine is applying and had the same problem - if it’s okay to use firefox I will pass the info on.</p>